


a year and a day.

by aiineslin



Category: Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi | Spirited Away
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-29
Updated: 2013-01-29
Packaged: 2017-11-27 10:29:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/660907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aiineslin/pseuds/aiineslin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was once a weasel, quick of eye and claw.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a year and a day.

There was once a weasel, quick of eye and claw.

It was coloured a healthy chestnut brown, and wore socks of black on its four feet. The weasel, it ate chickens and killed cats – it grew big and strong and powerful, and along the way, as this things were wont to do, it gained power. The weasel terrorised villages, it went into them and stole large and larger prey – it made off in the deep night with crying goats and lowing cattle, and when morning rolled about the only traces left of them were bones picked clean, red blood, disturbed earth and a squeal in the night.

And more time passed, days and nights rolled by and the weasel grew ever larger, ever greedier – and oft times wisdom did not accompany power – and the weasel decided, yes, it shall hunt smarter prey than these fat beasts with slow minds and slower feet – it shall hunt small and nimble creatures that danced on two feet and made clever things with ten fingers and a sparking mind.

These creatures fought back. They made hurt in her flesh, sent spears that drew bloodbeads, left it a scar that slicked down a left hind leg – but always the weasel won, always the weasel chewed needle-sharp teeth into rough cloth and soft flesh, always the weasel prevailed to see the morning, licking its paws clean of sweet red blood.

The denizens of the river that it stayed close to paid homage to the weasel, they dragged down fishing boats and presented baubles and bloated corpse meat to the weasel in an attempt to stave away the weasel’s hunger. The weasel ate these corpses, wet its muzzle with dead blood and ate some sobbing baby river spirits – “I want fresh meat,” said the weasel disapprovingly. “Fresh blood.”

And then it blinked, a slow blink – it could make words now, form sounds that lapped and gurgled from its throat.

Good.

Stories of a demon sable travelled on swift legs across the land. Some two-legged dancers came riding on prey-beast, twirling deadly metal in their hands. The weasel consented to dance with all of them, to step and spin and rip their limbs off one by one. The weasel always won, in the end. 

“Why do you do this,” asked one of the dancers, one who had lived long enough to see his fellow dancer go down in headless glory, blood spouting from the stump upon his neck.

“I am hungry,” said the weasel as it tugged away the clinking wrappings of the dancer. “I am hungry, and I grow ever hungrier with every little bit I eat.” It put its nose in the dancer’s belly, nosing about in the red wetness. “This takes time, and blood! To cultivate, my good friend.”

The dancer did not reply, his mouth gaped open and his brown-black eyes stared blank at the lightening sky. 

So the weasel sighed, and licked its paws fastidiously clean before retiring into its burrow to sleep through the day. 

A spider came to visit it sometime in July, when it was burning with lust and base desire. The weasel crouched low to the ground, watching the spider as it settled itself comfortably in the crook joining tree branch to trunk. Its tail swished erratically through the undergrowth, and its tongue flicked periodically against the back of its yellowed teeth.

“You’ll do well to be careful,” cautioned the spider. Hands moved and flickered, weaving flimsy silk into something. “You’re becoming too big too fast.”

“Pfff,” sniffed the weasel, and it flipped itself over to roll on the packed earth, enjoying the feel of twigs scratching its itchy skin. The twisted mail it wore jangled in the still air, a mockery of the sound armour made when the dancers came riding on their horses. “Empty words. Words are wind. Caution, caution. Caution’s never gotten me anywhere.”

“Well,” mused the spider, almost to itself. “Haste makes waste.” It trailed a dirty fingernail down a length of silk, and pink ribboned after it. “Do not say I didn’t warn you, weasel.” 

“Sable,” gnashed the weasel, and it righted itself to peer up at the spider, half-hidden away in the green and brown. “Sable, I am.”

“Sable you are,” allowed the spider, a wintry smile lighting upon its thin lips. “Well, then. That concludes my visit. ‘ware the witchling that comes close, I say. Even a sable like you may have trouble fending her off.”

At this, the weasel hissed, and growled, and made to bat the spider down from its perch in the tree. But the spider jumped – a fluid bending and un-bending of its long legs – and was off and away in the treetops, skittering away as shrieks and curses rained down on its bald head. Only the pink cloth left hanging in the tree showed of its visit, and even then the weasel forgot about it as the deliciously slow days crawled past, even as the heat in its bones went away to lie dull in an empty womb.

The witch came in the winter, when winds howled unforgiving through the trees and the river spirits froze themselves, giggling no more.

“Witch!” Bellowed the weasel when it saw the witch with her stumpy body and powder-puff of white hair. It drew itself up to its full height, and oh, the weasel had indeed grown – it now stood tall as the oak, and its brown fur bristled magnificently under the cold silver moon. “Witch! I have heard of your coming!”

“Did you?” asked the witch, and she gave a little smile. And fires bloomed in her open hand.

The weasel did not give her time to chant her ugly spells, did not spare her seconds to whip an ensorcelled rope around it – oh no, the weasel was smarter, it charged forward and knocked the witch flat on her rump with a huge paw. And with the witch on the scattered leaves of the forest floor, the weasel looked down at her, curling back its lips in a magnificent sneer. 

It wound itself spitefully about the woman-witch, and it said, “Did you think you could catch me? With your little spells of flame and pain? I know pain! I mark it well, I love it, I give it – did you truly think you could catch me?”

“No,” said the witch, and her eyes were ghastly holes of black and her mouth was a slashing smiling gap of teeth and red tongue. “I know so.”

And she pulled out ugly, misshapen words from her gullet – dark and gloomy words that sagged and pressed themselves against the unbending shrills of the north wind – and the weasel squealed in horror, when a band of molten gold wove itself from air to squeeze tight around its muzzle, and it stopped squealing, only shuddered, when ropes tangled its four feet together so well it could no longer flee from the softly approaching stumpy little witch. 

“Lin,” said the witch. She stroked the weasel’s fur, marking the quick-quick heartbeat that drummed beneath the heaving flesh. “That will be your name, weasel. And you will wear a shape that is sweet and pleasing to the eye, that is small and agile, because there is no place in my great bathhouse – which I will build in a year and a day – for such huge, ugly creatures like you.”

She stroked the weasel’s fur again, petpetpet, and there was black hair beneath her wrinkled hands, rough black hair that felt unbound and straight to broad hips.

The weasel – Lin, it was called now, and tied to a dancer-shape with two legs and ten fingers – did not take long to recognise the old man that made his home in a rickety tower beside the bathhouse. 

Oh no, it took her only three hours and two minutes, from the moment it caught the squirming, sly scent of the old man.

The old man’s nest belched smoke to the heavens, and the room it stayed in hosted a myriad of smells. The weasel pinched its nose fastidiously, placing one hand on its new hips. Brown-black eyes played across the other’s lanky frame critically and it said, “You don’t look so different.”

The spider grinned, and gurned, “Spiders are small. Unlike hasty sables.” The stained bandages wrapped around its eyes, bandages that crackled with old black blood did nothing to lighten the weight of the lazy gaze that settled on the weasel.

The weasel’s mouth pressed into the thinnest of sneers, and it allowed the spider to trace a thin nail across its face.

“You’re one to speak! She took your eyes!”

The nail paused, and the weasel realised the curved yellow nail was far too close to its eye.

And then the weasel said, “We all pay our prices, no?”

The nail moved away, and the spider retracted its spindly arm.

“Go away, weasel.”

The weasel left quietly, but not before up-ending the basket of brightly coloured candy all over the floor in a rainbow mess, leaving the malformed blobs of black coal to squeal in tinny joy as they converged upon the heap in a black horde.

The bathhouse filled with not-people, others bound in dancer-skins that hung uncomfortably around their frames. Some slid into their dancer-skins faster, like the simpering toadying toad of a house-master – and after a while, even the weasel was hard-put to discern the wet sliminess of a toad from the pink fleshiness of a dancer while in his vicinity.

The weasel wore pink and blue and white, and the witch gave her dominion over a small squadron of not-people. Slugs, birds, toads – the weasel marked them all and sneered at them, all little weaklings that would have filled little of her belly when she was still wearing her fur and sharp teeth.

But she had no teeth now, no claws – so the weasel took her frustrations out by barking commands and giving them ill-fitting second skins to wear.  
Time moved slow, and news reached the bathhouse one day in the middle of spring.

“The carriages are going one-way now,” reported Kuro, (what had she been before this? Lin cannot remember. Her nose was less sharp now, only attuned to the sharp smell of soap and the fragrance of rice.) her eyes wide. “They’re not turning back.”

“No?” said Lin, and something in her brown eyes made Kuro draw back slightly, and maybe Lin touched a fingernail to her teeth – where once was rows of sharp needly pain and were now simple grinders that could not tear – and maybe she smiled, because if you waited long enough and gave up enough, the heavens would open and the greater gods up above would smile.

“The carriages are going one-way,” told Lin to Kamajii, when she came to the tower to feed the living coal-dust. 

“They are?” The bandages around his eyes were old and yellowed with age, and Lin frowned to see them.

“There are things called spectacles now,” said Lin. “You should get one of those.”

“Mm,” said Kamajii, and the wrinkles in his furrowed brow said he was thinking.

She didn’t tell anybody anymore about this occurrence, but the witch had eyes and ears everywhere (especially since now she had a crow on her shoulder and a dragon watching her back) – and one day when Lin received her wages, she realised her pay had been docked.

That everybody’s pay was docked, and that living expenses were taken into account and when she checked with the attendant at the train station, the prices of a seat aboard the carriage had gone up.

“Bastards,” said she to Kamajii, one summer night when the air was heavy and the night was dark and most people were dead to the world coddled in their beds. “ _Bastards_.”

Kamajii smoked his pipe, and said nothing, and Lin ground her not-sharp teeth in frustration.

Summers passed, and the dragon smelled less like a river each day and the crow became ever more smug and Kamajii bought black spectacles from a passing medicine seller, and Lin scrubbed ever harder at wooden floors and thought about rumbling steam trains running over the ocean over into the horizon.

And one day a new smell permeated the bathhouse, and it took Lin long moments to remember where she had once smelled this scent (not smudged over with the smell of pig, no) – and Lin blinked, and smiled.


End file.
